(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of calculating power consumption of an air conditioner, and more particularly, to a method of calculating power consumption of an air conditioner that calculates power consumed by an air conditioner more accurately.
(b) Description of the Related Art
In general, an electric vehicle receives electric energy from the outside environment, charges a battery with the received electric energy, and then obtains power, which is mechanical energy, with a voltage charged in the battery through a motor coupled to wheels. Accordingly, the electric vehicle should detect a state of a battery, such as a current temperature of the battery and a state of charge (SOC) of the battery, and manage the battery to maintain the state of the battery at a predetermined level or greater.
Accordingly, a battery management system (BMS), which generally manages a state of the battery, prevents shortening the life span according to deterioration of durability of the battery, and notifies a vehicle controller performing a general operation of SOC information about the battery, thereby assisting the vehicle to be traveled while considering the state of the battery. In the electric vehicle using a high voltage battery, an SOC of the battery should be recognized, and further, a technology is needed to recognize a residual capacity of the battery while traveling and to notify a driver of the recognized residual capacity. In this connection, similar to an internal combustion vehicle which predicts a distance to empty (DTE) based on a current fuel state and notifies a driver of the predicted DTE, the electric vehicle provides a function of estimating a DTE (e.g., residual travel distance) based on a current energy state of a battery and displaying the estimated DTE on a cluster, and the like.
As a method of calculating a DTE of an electric vehicle according to the related art, a method of estimating a DTE using a relationship between an SOC (%), which is residual energy of a high voltage battery, and an energy consumption ratio of the vehicle per distance unit has been used. In particular, the amount of energy consumption of a past travel cycle is be reflected to the calculation of the DTE, and in this case, the DTE is calculated by reflecting the total amount of battery consumption. The total amount of battery consumption includes energy consumed by an air conditioner in the past travel cycle, and thus it may not be possible to calculate an accurate DTE except for the portion of the energy consumption of the air conditioner. Accordingly, to more accurately predict the DTE, a method of accurately predicting energy consumption of an air conditioner is required.
The above information disclosed in this section is merely for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.